Internationalisation and fonts - a suggestion

[Pete French]

In my exploration of fonts this afternoon I came across this project
on Savannah: http://www.nongnu.org/freefont/ and have been playing with
these as the default font for a while. I havent seen anyone on this list
mention these before so I was very interested. The FreeSans looks very good
as the default for Latin users, plus it contains just about everything for
all other europena languages (including greek, cyrillic and armenian, though
not georgian). Devenagri and hebrew script is supported, as well as the kana
parts of japanese. O.K., theres no chinese/kanji and thai is serif-only,
but thats still a very wide range of scripts and its only going to get wider.

Plus the fonts are GPL and are aimed at GNU projects which want to ship their
own fonts as far as I can make out.

So I was thinking wouldn't it be nice if...

        1) We shipped these to install automatically with art backend
        2) We set the default font for art to be FreeSans
        3) We make art the default backend

This would give us much wider support for international languages "out of
the box" for free, and without any downsides that I can see. The lisences
are compatible and the the last time Adam mentioned making art the default
then the only objections were the font installation I seem to recall.

So, how about it ? Comments ?

-bat.